Penn State scientist in hot seat over e-mails

A Penn State University science professor is at the center of the firestorm over an anonymous hacker’s release of more than 1,000 once-private e-mails sent by global warming scientists.

Michael E. Mann, director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, is marked as author, recipient or subject of several of the e-mails, which skeptics say are proof that Mann and others have been distorting data to make the case for global warming.

Mann has denied any manipulation of facts, but skeptics are pointing to one e-mail in particular as evidence that he and others have engaged in a statistical deception to hide drops in global temperatures and exaggerate warming trends.

According to the Nov. 16, 1999, e-mail, scientist Phil Jones wrote to Mann and two other scientists to say: ”I’ve just completed Mike [Mann]’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Jones is director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain, the origin of the e-mail records released Thursday. ”Keith” is Keith Briffa, another professor at the Climate Research Unit.

Explaining the ”Nature trick” reference in the e-mail, Mann told the Wired.com blog the ”trick” was simply a solution to the problem of displaying temperature data in a way that makes the information easier to understand.

Penn State Will Investigate Climategate

Jeff Greer
US News & World Report
November 30, 2009

Among other things, the Watergate scandal of the 1970s gave us a great naming convention for future scandals. Take “Climategate” at Penn State. That’s what people are calling the controversy surrounding leaked E-mails among climate change researchers that climate change opponents say expose the researchers’ falsification of data. One Penn State professor is involved in the scandal.

The Penn State administration plans to investigate Climategate and determine if it needs to take further action, the Daily Collegian reports. A little more than a week ago, E-mails exchanged among an English university’s climate change researchers were illegally obtained from a server and posted online, the report says.

Climate change opponents say the E-mails indicate that climate change researchers—including Penn State Prof. Michael Mann—exaggerated or fabricated global warming data. And, according to the report, some E-mails indicate that the director of the research unit in question may have contacted researchers and asked them to “delete certain E-mails.”